Scientists examining satellite images have done a double-take at shots of northeast India - as an island that was previously called home by approximately 10,000 people has now completely vanished from sight. The perpetrator of this horrific crime? Actually, you and I...

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

Uninhabited islands have previously succumbed to global warming, but this is officially the first time people have actually had to vacate an island prior to submergence.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

This article reminds me how out of touch we can be with the plight of people in many parts of the world, and how we don't usually pay attention until something catastrophic has occured:

So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures. - The Independent.